drinking cultures - alcohol and identity - wilson

The performancesof local, class, ethnic, gender and national identity which I observed and in which Iparticipated in the Irish midlands and in Dublin a quarter of a century ago were thes

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Drinking cultures : alcohol and identity / edited by Thomas M Wilson

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1 Drinking of alcoholic beverages 2 Drinking customs 3

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8 Romantic Moods: Food, Beer, Music and the Yucatecan Soul

9 Cheers and Booze: Football and Festa Drinking in Malta

10 Drinking Rituals, Identity and Politics in a Basque Town

11 Alcohol and Masculinity: The Case of Ethnic Youth Gangs

Geoffrey P Hunt, Kathleen MacKenzie and Karen Joe-Laidler 225

12 Drinking Politics: Alcohol, Drugs and the Problem of US Civil

Society

6.1 A comparison of beverages included in the published set menus for

6.2 Worldwide cognac sales in millions of bottles, 2000–1 1206.3 Sales of cognac by country in millions of bottles, 1981–2001 121

My interest in the themes of this book began during my doctoral field research, whenthe boundaries of my American ethnic identity were clarified in the land of myancestors, when even those things I had come to believe were second nature to ‘theIrish’ were revealed as contestable sites and disputable practices The performances

of local, class, ethnic, gender and national identity which I observed and in which Iparticipated in the Irish midlands and in Dublin a quarter of a century ago were thestart of my research interest in the politics of culture, and a fascination with theintersections of identity, culture and power in drinking arenas and through drinkingpractices I am grateful to the Western Europe Program of the Social Science ResearchCouncil, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner Gren Foundation forAnthropological Research for their financial support of my original research inIreland, and to Wenner Gren, the National Endowment for the Humanities, theLeverhulme Trust and the British Academy for their support of my later research inNorthern Ireland; both research projects have informed my contribution to thisvolume and allowed me to develop the perspectives on national identity whichoriginally led me to conceive the idea of this book I would also like to thank thefollowing people for their various forms of aid and efforts on my behalf, recently andover the years, all of which facilitated the production of this book: William Cosgrave,Andrew Dawson, Eddie Farrell, Jim FitzSimons, Paddy FitzSimons, Colm Geraghty,Jonathan Hill, Sharryn Kasmir, Mac Marshall, A Lynn Martin, Anahid Ordjanian,Vincent and Kate O’Reilly, Barney Reilly, David Sutton and Damian Usher.Special thanks are due to Teodora Corina Hasegan for her editorial support inproofreading, formatting and copyediting, and overall good cheer as we balanced thepreparation of this manuscript with other editorial duties, and to Kathryn Earle, AnneHobbs, Jennifer Howell and Hannah Shakespeare at Berg Publishers for their help atevery stage of a process which turned out to be much longer than anticipated.Kathryn’s enthusiastic and critical reception of the themes of this book was theprimary stimulus to its initiation, and her continuing patience and understanding overthe course of its production are much appreciated I am grateful for the graciousness

of the contributors to this book, who allowed me to put the project on hold for sometime while my family and I uprooted ourselves from Northern Ireland to move to anew job and home in the Southern Tier of New York State Finally, I wish to dedicatethis book to my friend and mentor, Edward C Hansen, whose efforts at one point in

my graduate education kept my eyes on the goal of a Ph.D., and whose criticalapproaches to politics, power, culture and drinking first made me aware of the issues

which the contributors to this book address While the follies of youth have begun

to recede, and Ed and I no longer pass the time over a drink, the memories of learninganthropology with him will always prove intoxicating

Gary Armstrong lectures in the Department of Sport Sciences at Brunel University.

He has written Football Hooligans: Knowing the Score (1998), and has co-edited (with Richard Giulianotti) Entering the Field: New Perspectives on World Football (1997), Football Cultures and Identities (1999), and Fear and Loathing in World Football (2001) – all published by Berg.

Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz received his Ph.D in 1993 at McGill University and has

conducted research among Sardinian pastoralists, Chiapas healers and currently, inYucatan, Mexico, conducts research on cuisine and regional identity His book

Globalización, conocimiento y poder: Médicos locales y sus luchas por el imiento en Chiapas, was published in 2002 by Plaza y Valdés and the Universidad

Reconoc-Autónoma de Yucatán He is Professor of Anthropology at the Facultad de CienciasAntropológicas of the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán

Marion Demossier is Senior Lecturer in French and European Studies at the

Uni-versity of Bath She is the author of various works on wine producers and wineconsumers in France and has published on culture and identity in France and Europe.Her teaching is mainly in French and European Politics and Society Her first

monograph, Hommes et vins: Une anthropologie du vignoble bourguignon (1999,

Editions universitaires de Dijon) won the prix Lucien Perriaux She is the treasurerfor ICAF Europe (International Commission for the Anthropology of Food) and is

currently writing a book entitled The Wandering Drinker: An Anthropology of Wine Culture and Consumption in France.

Pauline Garvey is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology in the National

University of Ireland, Maynooth Among her other publications are ‘Drinking,

Driving and Daring in Norway’, in D Miller, ed Car Cultures (2001, Berg), and

‘How to Have a “Good Home”: The Practical Aesthetic and Normativity in Norway’,

Journal of Design History (2003).

Timothy M Hall completed his Ph.D at the University of California – San Diego

with a specialization in psychiatric anthropology in 2003, and will receive an MDfrom the same university in 2005

Geoffrey P Hunt is a social anthropologist, who has done extensive ethnographic

research in West Africa, England and most recently in the United States He receivedhis Ph.D in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent Currently he is thePrincipal Investigator on two National Institutes of Health-funded research projects:one on street gangs, motherhood and violence and the second on the social context

of club drugs From research data gleaned from research on street gangs, Dr Hunt andhis research team have published over thirty articles focusing on gangs, gang mem-bers and violent behaviour

Karen Joe-Laidler received her Ph.D in sociology at the University of California

at Davis She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at theUniversity of Hong Kong For the past ten years, her research and writing havefocused on ethnic youth gangs and violence, and drug use and problems concentrat-ing specifically on issues associated with young women She is currently the Co-Principal Investigator with Geoffrey Hunt on two ongoing National Institute ofHealth studies on youth gangs and on the social context of club drugs use

Sharryn Kasmir is the author of The Myth of Mondragón: Cooperatives, Politics,

and Working-Class Life in a Basque Town (1996, SUNY Press), as well as articles

and essays on the intersections of working-class and nationalist politics in the Basqueregion of Spain Currently, she is writing about issues of working-class identity andactivism in a US automobile factory She is Associate Professor of Anthropology atHofstra University

Kathleen MacKenzie received her MA in anthropology at San Jose State University.

Currently, she is project manager on a National Institute of Health-funded researchproject on street gangs, motherhood and violence

Anthony Marcus is a Lecturer in the School of Anthropology, Geography &

Envi-ronmental Studies of the University of Melbourne He is an urban anthropologistwith research interests in political economy, civil society, the anthropology of thestate, poverty amelioration, public policy, and gender, ‘race’ and ethnicity in the

Americas He is the author of Anthropology for A Small Planet (1996, Brandywine

Press)

Jon P Mitchell is Reader in Anthropology at the University of Sussex He has been

researching Maltese culture and society since 1991 and is author of Ambivalent Europeans: Ritual, Memory and the Public Sphere in Malta (2002, Routledge), co- editor (with Paul Clough) of Powers of Good and Evil: Commodity, Morality and Popular Belief (2002, Berghahn), and editor of Modernity in the Mediterranean (special issue of Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 12 (1): 2002) He is currently

working with Gary Armstrong on a book about football in Malta, and with historianAlex Shepard on a book about Anthropology and History.

Brian Moeran is Professor of Culture and Communication at the Copenhagen

Business School A social anthropologist by training, he has published widely onadvertising, aesthetics, art and media in Japan and Asia Recent edited books include

Asian Media Productions (2001, Curzon) and Advertising Cultures (with Timothy de

Waal Malefyt, 2003, Berg) His current research is on women’s fashion magazinesand on the production and reception of smells cross-culturally

Cliona O’Carroll is a postdoctoral fellow with the Department of Folklore and

Ethnology, National University of Ireland at Cork, Ireland Her research interestsinclude experiences of migrancy, the creation of meaning in everyday life and theethnographic interview as a site of collaborative meaning construction

Josephine Smart is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Calgary She has

conducted research on street hawkers and the informal economy in Hong Kong, thenature and strategies of Hong Kong foreign direct investment in China, Chinesebusiness immigration to Canada, and the impact of NAFTA on three cities (one each

in Canada, the USA and Mexico) Her current research is a study of the history ofChinese restaurant food in Canada and its articulation with ethnic and national

identity issues Her most recent book is Plural Globalities in Multiple Localities New World Borders (co-editor Martha Rees, 2001, University Press of America).

-Gabriela Vargas-Cetina (Ph.D., McGill University, 1994) has conducted research

among Henequen growers in Yucatán, among Plains First Nations in Alberta, withpastoralists in Sardinia and weavers in Chiapas cooperatives and, currently, conducts

research on music and identity in Yucatán Her most recent book (as editor), De lo público a lo privado: Organizaciones en Chiapas (2002), was published by CIESAS

and Miguel Angel Porrua She is Professor of Anthropology at the Facultad deCiencias Antropologicas of the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán

Thomas M Wilson is Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University, State

University of New York He has conducted ethnographic field research in Ireland, theUnited Kingdom and Hungary on European integration, international borders and

national identity He is the co-author (with Hastings Donnan) of Borders: Frontiers

of Identity, Nation and State (1999, Berg), the co-editor (with Irène Bellier) of An Anthropology of the European Union (2000, Berg) and the co-editor (with James Anderson and Liam O’Dowd) of New Borders for a Changing Europe (2003, Frank

Cass)

In this ignorant bliss of ethnic pride and anthropological hubris, I felt that I wasalmost as Irish as the real Irish Moreover, I was the first one of my family who hadbeen born in America who was coming ‘home’ to Ireland In fact, one of my goals

of the summer trip was to visit our ‘home place’, from which my grandparents hademigrated early in the twentieth century Although it is startling to me now, the fact

is that I was not in the least worried about whether I would fit in or be accepted inIreland In more contemporary American parlance, I was sure that I talked the talkand walked the walk

But I was also reasonably sure that I did not know everything that was needed –after all I had not been raised in Ireland, had not learned ‘Irish-Irish’ culture frombirth I anticipated that there were sure to be many differences in outlook, behaviourand ideologies Furthermore, I also came complete with untested hypothesis: my goalthat summer a generation ago was to find a site for my dissertation research which Iexpected would commence the following summer I was looking for a location with

a combination of characteristics which would enable me to critically engage thecomparative anthropology of Irish society and culture In my terms this meant that

I wanted a big town in a developed agricultural zone, with local opportunities foroff-farm employment But I had never done ethnographic research, had never tried

to find an appropriate site, establish contacts and start my own ‘networks’, all thestuff of the anthropology of Europe which I had studied for the last seven years Theuniversal questions of generations of anthropologists nagged me: would my hypo-thesis stand up? Would I stand up to the challenge?

I had arrived in Shannon airport, and had booked a room in a Limerick hotel,planning to spend the night there before setting off to the cousins’ farm I lookedforward to my first night in Ireland, and planned to have my first real pint of Guin-ness (At that time it was not exported from Ireland to New York; I had previouslyonly encountered Guinness in small bottles imported from Jamaica.) The bus driverrecommended a local pub, which later that night proved to be my first experience of

an Irish pub, an institution venerated worldwide as one of the most important in theproduction and reproduction of Irish culture The pub was packed, it was noisy andsmoky, and I had some difficulty getting close to the bar But I was happy to besurrounded by the weekend crowd, and asked for my pint with some considerableanticipation Actually, I had to shout my order to the barman, to be heard over the din

of patron interaction But even at that tender stage of the evening I had already made

my first miscalculation, the first of many: I had gone to the pub at 10 p.m., a normaldrinking hour back home in New York, but as I was to discover that night, this wasonly an hour and a half short of the summer closing time in Ireland, when the pace

of drinking and discourse picked up considerably

I handed the barman a five pound note, for the pint which cost 38 pence or so.When he handed the change back to me I promptly put it on the bar In retrospect Irealize that this too was a sign of my cockiness and an example of my ignorance Ihad already determined through many travels away from my hometown of Brooklyn,and the wider social space of New York City, that most Americans did not drink in

‘rounds’, an elaborate system of reciprocity which structured our local drinkingpractices I knew that this was an Irish custom (it did not matter to me that it was also

a common British practice too), but mistakenly thought that Brooklyn rounds werethe same as Irish rounds As a result I wanted to leave my money on the bar in order

to indicate to the barman a number of things: that I was staying for a while, theapproximate amount of drink I expected to consume (to be judged by him by theamount left on the bar), to let him know that a tip was in the offing, and to stake aclaim to that part of the bar space But I did not get too far The barman immediatelypicked up the money, made a show of giving it back to me, in my palm, and stated

in what I thought was too loud a voice: ‘Sir, over here, we never leave our money on

the bar.’

That was my first experience of Irish drinking (i.e., drinking alcohol in Ireland),which made me consider, immediately, what it was that I was assuming about Irishculture My assumptions were based on my own ethnic heritage in the USA, theethnographies on Ireland which I had scrupulously dissected over the previous three

years, and the drinking practices which I had learned in Brooklyn This was also myfirst experience of the bounded and sited nature of what I thought of as an ethnic or

a national culture: while ‘Irishness’, whatever it is and wherever it is found, musthave some things in common, it is also just as true to conclude that it is sociallyconstructed and produced differentially, based in part on the circumstances of place,space and social structural context Irish drinking culture, whether in Brooklyn or inLimerick, is a manifestation of the sameness and differentiation of culture andidentity

Drinking culture in Ireland, at home or in more public domains, has not been amajor interest in the ethnography of Ireland, but it should be The pub, or publichouse, is a particularly important ethnographic arena, wherein drinking practices andother aspects of Irish culture merge, and where the questions of identity and identifi-cation continually matter In my experiences of over twenty-five years of Irish pubactivities, principally but not exclusively in rural areas near Dublin and in Belfastcity, the significance of drink, and pubs, in Irish life has been as important andinteresting to the people of Ireland as it has been to me The Irish are aware of theirpopular, common and distinctive drinking practices, and use these as points ofdiscussion, most often but not only in the pub, but also as differentiating discourses

in the construction of socially meaningful identities and identifications It has beenthis experience of Irish drinking culture which has been my primary motivation indeveloping and organizing the book which this chapter introduces

The anecdote just related, in its mix of ethnographic occasion and context, revealsthe principal themes of the following chapters, all of which deal with the inter-sections of ethnography and ethnic and national drinking practices, and how thesepractices reflect ethnic and national distinctions and identities In fact, it is theintention of the contributors to this book to situate drinking within broadly conceivedcultural and political frameworks The places and behaviours of drinking, which inthis book refers specifically to the consumption of alcohol,1 should not be mistakenlyconceived as small ethnographic windows on more important structures and actions

in the observed social cases Rather, in the chapters of this book drinking is approachedmuch more sceptically, in order to interrogate whether the places, spaces and practices

of drinking play more important roles in the construction of social and politicalidentities than the anthropological literature has heretofore generally suggested.The cases we present examine something which many ethnographers have experi-enced, namely that drinking alcohol is an extremely important feature in the produc-tion and reproduction of ethnic, national, class, gender and local community identities,not only today but also historically, with little prospect for this importance and thesituation to change In many societies, perhaps the majority, drinking alcohol is a keypractice in the expression of identity, an element in the construction and dissemination

of national and other cultures And the roles of drinking, in terms of culture andidentity, are not ‘simply’ (as if such things are simple) aspects of everyday life, thatarena of discourse and action so beloved of ethnographers Drinking is the veritable

stuff of any and perhaps every level and type of culture, and is implicated in thebehaviours, values, ideologies and histories of these cultures In essence drinking isitself cultural; it is not so much an example of national and other cultural practices,

in the sense that it is a performance of something that runs deeper in the national orethnic makeup, as much as it is itself a bedrock of national and ethnic culture Assuch it is an integral social, political and economic practice, a manifestation of theinstitutions, actions and values of culture

This book is a collection of ethnographic case studies in the sites, practices andmeanings of drinking, and the various roles which drinking plays in identity andculture While most chapters focus principally on ethnic and national culture, and allconsider such identities, they also explore the intersections of other identities, such

as those of gender, age and class, with various drinking arenas, fields, networks,occasions, places and spaces The anthropology of alcohol and drinking has a longand distinguished pedigree, but some of the major figures in this anthropologicaltradition have long recognized the need to desist to some extent from theorizingdrinking alcohol as a social problem, and to pay more attention to the roles whichalcohol and drinking play in historical and contemporary practices and imaginings

of the nation and other cultural and political formations (see, for example, the reviewessays by Heath 1987a and Hunt and Barker 2001) The authors of the chapters inthis book seek to contribute to the ways in which the relationships among drinking,culture and identity are perceived and studied by anthropologists and other socialscientists In particular they seek to take the analysis of drinking beyond descriptivenotions of performing culture and expressing identity in order to view drinking sitesand practices as realizations of national, ethnic, gender and class culture Beforesome of the chapters’ particular themes are introduced, however, a brief review of theanthropology of drinking alcohol and its relation to studies of national identity andculture is in order

Leftovers and Main Courses

There is no more important figure in the international anthropological study ofalcohol and culture than Dwight Heath, whose historical and ethnographic workshave characterized the principal concerns of anthropologists who have studied thedrinking of alcohol in every decade since the 1960s (see, for examples of this body

of work, Heath 1975, 1976, 1987a, 1987b, 2000) In one of his review essays, Heath(1987a: 113) concluded that ‘A special strength of anthropology continues to be itsanomalous role as “the science of leftovers.” What this means with respect to thestudy of alcohol is that, unlike many others, we study “moderate” or “normal”drinking – and abstaining – as well as “excessive” or “alcoholic” drinking.’ Thisleftover status has many referents, including those established by the fundinginstitutions in the US and elsewhere, where most money is allocated to those who

seek to investigate alcohol in its socially and medically detrimental roles (for adiscussion of this funding culture, see Hunt and Barker 2001) But leftover also refers

to those behavioural practices which are not seen by anthropologists to be socialproblems, but rather research problematics, problems in the understanding andconfiguration of social, political and economic formations In the terms which mostconcern us in this book, these are the ‘leftover’ problems of identity formation andreproduction, the ideas, values and practices of drinking and other cultures But

‘leftover’ is a metaphor which still leaves one with the impression that the mainconcerns are or were elsewhere, ‘courses’ which are meatier and more substantial.The consumption metaphors are apt: with drinking cultures we are simultaneouslyexamining the consumption of commodities and the behaviours of social and culturalintegration and differentiation In fact alcohol is an excellent example of the com-modities which concerned Arjun Appadurai in his examination of the social life ofthings (1986), guiding us to consider alcohol’s role as a commodity and an element

in differential regimes of value in the history of our ethnic and national groups Assuch, alcohol must be seen as a main course, of food, of action, and of value It is not

a peripheral or easily discarded menu item in the preparation of many identities; what

is primarily leftover here is the need to reconsider the importance of drinking to somany social, political and economic institutions, symbols and actions

One reason why calls for the re-evaluation of studies of alcohol and drinking is

a recurrent theme in many anthropological writings2 is that, while there has been agreat deal written by anthropologists about various forms of alcohol and drink-related behaviour, most of these writings are based on research which was notfocused principally on them As Heath concluded in an early assessment, researchresults which examined drinking and alcohol were a ‘felicitous by-product’ of otherresearch activities (Heath 1975: 4; see also Hunt and Barker 2001: 167) ‘This wasbecause whatever other concerns inspired their ethnographic project they could notavoid taking note of the importance of drinking in the lives of the people they livedamong’ (Douglas 1987: 3)

In other words many anthropological studies of alcohol-related behaviours wereunintended consequences of research and research designs which had other constel-lations of behaviour and cultural meanings as their principal, and perhaps alsosecondary, focuses This is certainly the case with me and my two main researchprojects in Ireland, the first of which was of agricultural politics in the prosperouseastern Midlands, followed almost a decade later with a study of European Unionimpact on borderland life in Northern Ireland

Even given this by-production of anthropological studies of drinking and alcohol,

a situation which the authors in this book suggest derives as much from the centralrole of alcohol in the historical configuration of culture and identity as it does fromthe interest in alcohol as a social and medical contaminant, since the 1960s there hasbeen a growing but variable interest by anthropologists and other ethnographers inthe study of alcohol and culture This is partly the result of a recognition of the

importance of alcohol to so many peoples and cultures, where drinking has ingly been seen in anthropology as a research subject, object and tool, a means ofdoing ethnography as well as a focus for it It is also due to the emotional andintricate relationships which drinking engenders, and the complex ways in which itfigures in social structures, political processes and economic and other values AsHeath (1976: 43) has concluded:

increas-Despite its widespread occurrence, alcohol is almost universally subject to rules andregulations unlike those that pertain to other drinks Not only are there usually specialrules about alcoholic beverages, but the rules tend to have peculiarly emotional charge.This affective quality relates not only to drinking, but also to drunkenness and drunkencomportment Whether predominant feelings about these are positive, negative, orambivalent varies from culture to culture, but indifference is rare, and feelings areusually much stronger in connection with alcohol than with respect to other things

The contributions to this volume are ample testament to the emotional andinstitutional intricacies of alcohol and drinking in many cultures and societies acrossthe globe But it seems that this growing awareness of alcohol and drinking inanthropology also has a great deal to do with the importance of drink to the ethno-graphic experience, an eventuality surprisingly unanticipated by many ethnographers,including some of our authors in this volume who reflexively discuss their ownrelations with alcohol and those who drink it At one point in my doctoral research

I thought it prudent to give up ‘the drink’, and when in pub situations to ask for a

‘soda water and lime’ My field notes improved dramatically, but only in line withsome deteriorating social relationships A few key informants, who had becomeaccustomed to sharing information with me in pubs, simply wondered why I hadgone off the drink, and were suspicious of my motives I like to tell myself that in theinterests of science I was forced to go back on the beer, after a three-month hiatus,after which the relationships that had been in jeopardy were quickly restored.Alcohol is integral to many ethnographic experiences, just as it is integral to manysocieties and cultures (many of whom might be approached as ‘alcohol cultures’, toparaphrase Michael Kearney’s early notions of life in a village in Oaxaca [1970]).Alcohol is often part of informal and predictable anthropological methodologies andmethods Anthropologists often (and perhaps in the majority of the societies in which

we work) gain confidence, trust, information and access to wider networks throughand with the use of alcohol, in various drinking locations, within various drinkingsocial and political fields, and on various drinking occasions.3

I do not want to imply that ethnographers are using foul or secretive means to plytheir trade Quite the opposite message is intended Anthropologists often need, andsometimes welcome the chance, to immerse themselves in drinking cultures as surelyand as fully as they must be immersed in any other aspect of culture and societyamong the people they seek to know and study The one inescapable difference, as

suggested by Heath in the quotation above, is that drink is one of the most noticeable,emotional and important ways in which people express and discuss their identitiesand cultures Alcohol is one of the ingredients in social cement, but also one of themeans to remove such adhesion As a result, it is a tool of our profession, and one ofthe key metaphors and practices of the cultures we seek to explicate.

The importance of drink and drinking to ethnographers is clear We meet ants and share alcohol We partake of food and drink in ritual and other celebratoryevents We use alcohol as gifts and enticements, however meager and unconscious.And we drink for many of the reasons our hosts do: to relax, to laugh, to enhanceconviviality, and as an expression of our own multiple and often overlapping,sometimes contradictory, identities

inform-While much of this increasing research and publishing has focused on alcohol anddrinking as socially constituted problems, affecting individuals, families and widergroups in society, a good deal of it has been variously comparative, functional,structural, symbolic and historical, in ways which have provided a necessary comple-ment, perhaps corrective, to broader social and physical science concerns withalcohol and alcoholism’s deleterious effects This is not to say that alcohol is not atthe core of some individual and social, psychological and medical, problems Butanthropologists have also produced evidence that drinking alcohol is an importantand celebrated aspect of many societies, in ways which beg it to be treated as normaland normative This new attention to drinking, an attention which has widened anddeepened among anthropologists since the 1970s, reflects the simple but importantrealization that ‘alcohol use – like kinship, religion, or sexual division of labor – canprovide a useful window on the linkages among many kinds of belief and behavior’(Heath 1987a: 102)

However, not all linkages, beliefs and behaviours have been given equal weightand attention by anthropologists Foremost among the neglected aspects of theanthropology of drinking and alcohol are the roles which they have played in thehistorical and contemporary construction of national, ethnic and other cultures andidentities, the subject of this book This neglect is partly a response to new fundingconstraints, which in the USA at least have favoured the support of social sciencewhich sees alcohol and drugs as social and medical problems which need to be fixed

As Hunt and Barker (2001: 171–2) see it, the political war on alcohol and drugs inAmerica has generated new attitudes to alcohol, which in turn has had funding andsocial policy effects: ‘This narrowing of focus means that anthropology is increas-ingly obliged to forgo one of its most important potential contributions to the field

of alcohol and drug research – namely, its charting of the normal and everyday use

of these substances, with their attendant rituals, customs, and paraphernalia withinsocial and cultural contexts’ (Hunt and Barker 2001: 171)

The relative absence of certain cultural contexts to drinking behaviours may also

be the result of new theorizing of ethnography and culture in anthropology, which hasshifted the focus of much research away from ethnic groups, nations and states

Certain wider social and political contexts have receded in ethnographic studies,which often still flirt with alcohol in terms of its evil and detrimental effects As Huntand Barker have concluded, ‘it is a rare anthropological study indeed which situatesproblem drinkers in a familial, occupational, economic, social, religious, political, oreducational context, especially one that takes gender and age/life stage or ethnicityinto serious account’ (2001: 169).

Nevertheless, although rare, such studies have been done, and since the 1980sthere has been a broader anthropological interest in alcohol and culture, an interestthat has explicitly sought to move beyond descriptive analyses in order to contribute

to more inclusive and sophisticated theorizing (as in the unified model for thecomparative study of ingested substances put forward by Hunt and Barker 2001).According to Heath (1987a: 105–12), in the 1970s and 1980s significant progresswas made in the anthropology of alcohol and drinking, when the ‘social problem’models became less important to ethnographers, at least in terms of types and num-bers of the studies conducted, due to a significant rise in interest in analyses ofdrinking populations, their cultural contexts, with new attention paid to appropriatemethodologies and the relationships among drinking, culture and applied anthropo-logical concerns These interests have also reflected major shifts in the intellectualand professional concerns of anthropologists

Since the 1970s, in fact, anthropologists have steadily moved away from whatonce had been a strict disciplinary focus on non-Western and ‘primitive’ societies,and in the West on peasants and proletarians, in order to engage issues of culture,power, identity and history at every level and among every group of people, in all ofthe hemispheres In these efforts, anthropologists have increasingly encountered theproblems of bounding culture and society, problems which were at the core of therevolutionary and reflexive turn in the writing and the doing of ethnography andculture, a transformation which motivates much of sociocultural anthropology today.One of the recurring problems which has affected the anthropology of alcohol anddrinking since the 1980s, an effect of this salutary change in the ways anthropologistsapproach research and writing, has been in the definition of social and culturalentities, communities, ethnic groups, nations and others While ethnographers stillattempt to conduct studies which might have policy appeal, they are finding itincreasingly difficult to provide analytical categories, in regard to race, ethnicity,class and nationality, which are of clear comparative utility As a result, ‘socialgroups and categories are referred to vaguely, inconsistently, and often inaccurately’(Heath 1987a: 106)

Mirroring this fuzzy effect in social and cultural definition, which is an able professional concern among anthropologists today, has been the increasingsubversion and transformation in real-world actors’ perceptions of their own essentialand constructed identities, in a newly reconceived global and transnational world,where ethnic and national identities are not what they once were, and where multi-culturalism is matched by multiple citizenships and supranationalism It is no wonder

inescap-that there is a dearth of studies of drinking and ethnic and national cultures today, but

in fact this situation has been with us for some time In the early 1980s, in the midst

of the sea change in the anthropology of drinking, one of the major forces in thatchange, Mac Marshall (whose 1979a edited collection, case studies drawn fromaround the world, was the first major ethnographic collection in anthropologicalstudies of alcohol), called for new research agendas, to redirect his anthropologicalcolleagues away from a focus on alcoholism and ethnic minorities in the USA,towards both the study of drinking and majority populations, and research on alcoholand nations and states (Marshall 1984) The relevance of this call is still apparent, as

is the relatively small response to it The need for more information about the role ofdrinking and alcohol in the construction and maintenance of identities is one of thecalls which this book seeks to answer The next section explores some of the issues

of culture, identity, nation and state that are central themes of the following chapters

Drinking and the Dimensions of Culture and Identity

While most other social sciences have concentrated on alcohol and drunkenness associal, psychological and health concerns, if not outright problems, anthropology hasjust as often looked at drinking in its cultural and historical contexts, as part of oftenacceptable, predictable, encouraged, mainstream, majority and normative behaviour

In so doing, however, anthropologists have had difficulties in recognizing anddefining the boundaries of these research populations These difficulties have manycauses, among them: people are more mobile, and culture is a tool and the metaphor

of this mobility; globalization relies on many forms of integration and disintegration,including processes of social identification and the production of culture; identitiesand cultures which seemed relatively immutable in the past have been shown to bequite changeable, historically and today; ethnicity and national identity have receded

in academic importance in favour of gender, race, sexuality and class identities; andanthropologists no longer study ‘cultures’, but culture in practice, process andnarrative For some scholars these changes are exciting challenges Heath, in hisassessment of the state of the art in the anthropology of alcohol (1987a), reviews thecomplexities of selecting and studying a research population in this new intellectualenvironment For others, these changes in the perception and use of culture do notpresent challenges worth accepting Many anthropologists today simply choose toavoid making the linkages between respondents, and their local actions and groups,

on the one hand, and the larger social formations of which they are a part, such asethnic groups, classes and nations, on the other As a result, anthropologists alsoincreasingly avoid studies of ‘communities’, largely due to the loss of confidence in

‘community’ as a valuable analytical category, even though many, perhaps most,people in the world use their notion of community daily as an expression of their owngroup solidarity and personal and group identities

Overall, in fact, anthropologists have stopped investigating ‘culture’ as the object,and in many cases as the subject, of their studies As is well known, in much anthro-pology there has been a turn away from theorizing culture, in terms of its fixity in

place and time to be sure, but also in terms of what it is in toto, by definition, and in

any socially meaningfully bounded way The best example of this avoidance ofstudying culture as a concrete entity, as a thing, which in some elite anthropological

circles is approached as if it was taboo, is Appadurai’s (1996: 12) vexing but

compel-ling notion that ‘culture’ is troublesome as a noun but attractive in its adjectival form,

‘cultural’ Appadurai concludes that culture itself is a differentiating process, aprocess of recognizing and mobilizing group identities:

When we therefore point to a practice, a distinction, a conception, an object, or anideology as having a cultural dimension (notice the adjectival use), we stress the idea

of situated difference, that is, difference in relation to something local, embodied,and significant culture is a pervasive dimension of human discourse that ex-ploits difference to generate diverse conceptions of group identity (Appadurai 1996:

12, 13)

It is the intention of the authors in this volume to examine the cultural dimensions

of drinking, as a practice, as a distinction, as an ideology, and as a conception ofindividual and group identity We seek to view drinking as an act of identification,

of differentiation and integration, and of the projection of homogeneity and geneity, particularly in the social arenas of ethnicity and national identity Drinkingpractices are active elements in individual and group identifications, and the siteswhere drinking takes place, the locales of regular and celebrated drinking, are placeswhere meanings are made, shared, disputed and reproduced, where identities takeshape, flourish and change To borrow from Keith Basso’s (1996) analysis of WesternApache notions of their landscape, where in their terms ‘wisdom sits in places’,culture not only sits in places, it also journeys on, for it also sits with people, anddifferentiates them one from the other, and group from group That is why in thisbook the contributors view drinking cultures in their wider social, political andeconomic contexts, as practices of ethnic, national, class, gender, sexual, racial andother identities As an integral part of this exercise, we also focus on the social fieldsand political arenas which define and shape drinking places and spaces (whether they

hetero-be regularized or spontaneous drinking practices and occasions) that serve as ing blocks of networks of friendship, work, business and politics, and as elements inthese differentiating processes of culture and identity

build-We expect that this approach may be less agreeable to anthropologists and otherethnographers who in the past have focused on alcohol and drinking in some of theways reviewed and critiqued above than perhaps it might be to anthropologistsinterested in theorizing identity and culture in local, transnational, global andsupranational contexts This is because as culture has waned as the principal object

of study in anthropology, it has waxed as the major means to describe and understandconfigurations of power, social practice, history and identity.

In fact, comparative studies of culture(s) have been all but replaced with sui generis as well as comparative studies of identity, as observed by anthropologists in

individual and small group interactions, in analyses often given substance by linked narratives of individuals’ identifications with groups and institutions, past andpresent These identity studies rely almost without exception on the appreciation ofthe intersections of individual and group performances of culture and identity, andthe setting out of cultural constructions of various manifestations of history, politics,economics and society, or the obverse historical constructions of culture In variousand overlapping ways, these studies of identity are often couched in terms of the

inter-‘politics of identity’ and ‘identity politics’.4

Culture and identity, including the inventions and constructions of history, valuesand social practices, are key factors in new theorizing beyond anthropology, thatdirects the critical eye away from such things as norms, institutions and organiza-tions This is especially apparent in studies of nations and nationalism, many ofwhich have become bogged down in attempts to support or oppose ‘primordial’ or

‘modernist’ interpretations of the nation (for examples of this ongoing debate, consult

any volume of the journal Nations and Nationalism) Critics of the primordialist

position point out that pre-modern or pre-industrial notions of the nation are ations of contemporary social constructions of the past, along with an undue empha-sis on the roles of culture and identity in the origin, organization and spread of thenation These critics also are sceptical of any notion of the nation that is not linked

combin-to the development of the nation- (or national) state Critics of the modernist positiontake the opposite view: the nation is a social construction, in that nations are simul-taneously cultural and political, and national differentiation, as a process of individualand group identification with ideas, people and social and political institutions, doesnot depend on the development of industrially forged nation-states Their evidence

is in the historical records of the cultural awareness of the nation as a process ofsocial differentiation

While it is not my intention to denigrate the defenders of either perspective on thenation, it is clear that there is middle ground of mutual agreement, perhaps bestrepresented in the works of Anthony Smith (see, for example, Smith 1999) andWalker Connor (see, for example, Connor 1993) In both primordialist and modernistperspectives, the nation is an inherently cultural entity, as cultural as it is political.This is not a surprising conclusion for anthropologists, but it is an important conclu-sion among political scientists, international relations specialists and other socialscientists, not least for the emphasis which must then be placed on the differentiatingprocesses of identity It is no wonder that scholars across the social sciences aretheorizing new forms of citizenship, now that culture and other forms of political andsocial identities are implicated in what was once seen as a relatively unproblematicset of relationships among citizens, their nations and their states Complicating these

efforts to theorize politics, power, culture and history are the various perspectives onglobalization, transnationalism and supranationalism, which together have asked usall to reconsider the dimensions and boundaries of past and contemporary nationsand states, as well as the people, goods, ideas and capital which flow across them(one manifestation of which is the increased attention to culture and state borders [cf.Donnan and Wilson 1999]).

For many years now scholars globally have benefited from theories on the nationwhich have asked us to use culture as a tool to understand ethnic groups and nations,and to do so we must focus on ethnic and national identities, those dimensions ofdifferentiation which Appadurai has clarified In this new theorizing of the nation,culture should not be viewed as a good tool with which to understand the real or truenation; on the contrary, ethnonational values, actions and organizations are theprocesses of nationalism When we consider ‘invented traditions’, ‘imagined com-munities’ and ‘ethnies’, we are demonstrating that culture and identity are not

windows on the nation, they are the nation National and ethnic identities are

dynamic states of being and becoming, and the values, actions and institutions whichmake these identities material are differentiating practices which must be of para-mount concern to social scientists Drinking is such a practice: it is a historical andcontemporary process of identity formation, maintenance, reproduction and trans-formation Its importance to scholars of national identity and ethnicity is not princi-pally in its role in grand state policies and the loftier ideals of the nation (althoughthere too alcohol has played a role) Rather, drinking is the stuff of everyday life,quotidian culture which at the end of the day may be as important to the lifeblood ofthe nation as are its origin myths, heroes and grand narratives

Drinking cultures are aspects of other cultures, part and parcel of wider webs ofsignificance, broader fields of affiliation, identification and action Drinking is itself

a practice of differentiation, an example of cultural praxis And although manyanthropologists still seek to avoid definitions, some scholars continue to recognizethe value in delineating the characteristics of something so important as ‘culture’ Inthe discussion I have presented here, I have been following Stuart Hall (1994: 527;emphasis in original), who has suggested that culture might be best conceived as

‘both the meanings and values which arise amongst distinctive social groups and

classes, on the basis of their given historical conditions and relationships, through

which they “handle” and respond to the conditions of existence; and as the lived

traditions and practices through which those “understandings” are expressed and inwhich they are embodied’ The chapters in this volume present case studies ofdrinking, culture, power and identity, in terms of their related practices, traditions,understandings and embodiments

Drinking Cultures

Given all of this attention to historical and contemporary anthropological accounts

of the intersections of drinking alcohol, culture and society, it is worth noting that one

of the most durable and influential analyses of the meanings and practices of drinkingremains that of Mary Douglas (1987), in her introduction to the second major (mostlyethnographic) collection of case studies in the social constructions associated withalcohol Douglas sets out in stark terms the principal differences between mostanthropologists’ accounts of drinking behaviour and those of other social scientists.Anthropological research cross-culturally shows that regular and repetitive drinking

is not necessarily perceived as drunkenness or alcoholism, and such behaviours maynot be a sign of a breakdown in culture, but rather may be evidence of a strong andsupportive cultural framework (Douglas 1987: 4) Drunkenness, when it is recognized

as such, is an expression of culture because it is socially learned and patterned, andvaries in structure and function from society to society Douglas (1987: 4) reminds

us that all cultures celebrate, and most do so with alcohol, and that ‘drinking isessentially a social act, performed in a recognized social context’ She argues thatdrinking acts to mark the boundaries of personal and group identities, making it apractice of inclusion and exclusion (Douglas 1987: 8–12) In these terms alcohol is

an element in social construction, and drinking is a key practice in the social struction of the world as it is and as it should be As the chapters in this collectiondemonstrate, this construction has both temporal and spatial components, whichprovide analytical frames upon which to build more ethnographically rich models ofnational and ethnic identity

con-David Sutton’s (2001: 7) intriguing interrogation of the notion that ‘we are what

we eat’, and ‘we are what we ate’, highlights the roles which food plays in identityformation and reproduction, today and in the past, and the ways in which these areremembered So too alcohol and drinking are often important elements in suchidentifications and cultural differentiations Just as food, in terms of its form andcontent, needs to be understood in the development of national and ethnic samenessand difference, drink’s place in these processes must be clarified and engagedcritically by anthropologists In this sense, the contributors to this volume, in variousways, investigate the extent to which we are what we drink, how we drink, where wedrink and when we drink And what, where and when you drink allows us to makejudgments about others and their identities, as Marion Demossier illustrates in her

chapter, where she discusses the assertion ‘tell me what you drink, and I shall tell you who you are’ Furthermore, who we are, and the actions which substantiate identity,

also give substance to the spatial and temporal dimensions to society, polity andeconomy

Drinking Places

Much anthropological attention has been paid to the places where people drink Thisemphasis has many sources People who drink may spend a great deal of time in theplaces where it is socially appropriate to drink, at least at the times when it isappropriate (for example, one should not drink in a pub after the licensing hours, andone should not have a martini in the den for breakfast) As a result, if drinking is asignificant practice, then where you drink also bears some scrutiny Drinking placesare locations where other significant behaviours are evident, where other things ofimportance occur For the most part, the data I gathered on local politics in ruralIreland were not collected in government offices and political meetings, but werefreely offered and sometimes hotly debated by opposing forces in the pub Drinkingplaces also have rules and dimensions of their own, which may serve as indicators

of structures and actions which are significant beyond their own walls

In fact, drinking places are often particularly significant and culturally patternedspaces for drinking and other intercourse As Hunt and Satterlee (1986b: 524) havesuggested, we might approach the spatial dimensions of drinking in various ways,depending on the significance of a number of related factors in any one drinking

‘arena’, where arena is seen to be an allocation of space with a surrounding boundarythat acts as both a physical barrier and symbolic border These arenas can be realized

in any ‘drinking space, which can be created instantaneously and practically where and the drinking place, with its more elaborate physical structure’ (Hunt and

any-Satterlee 1986b: 524; emphasis in original)

All of the chapters in this book examine drinking practices in drinking arenas.Some have placed particular importance on the relations among locality, territory anddrinking, with broad perspectives on the roles of alcohol in the construction of theregion, the nation and the state Other chapters focus more on drinking places andspaces Brian Moeran examines the spaces of drinking in rural Japan, domesticspaces configured around the table and in the garden, but also the public spaces ofvillage and valley Cliona O’Carroll compares two drinking places in Berlin, the

‘Irish’ pub and the Eckkneipe, the local version of the working-class bar While these

two places might have historical roots in common, in that the local pub in Ireland,

especially in the cities, functioned much like Eckkneipen continue to do in Berlin,

they no longer seem to serve the same purposes or peoples At least, this appears to

be the case with the German Irish pub As O’Carroll demonstrates, while the Irishpub presents itself as a comfortable alternative to Germans who do not have access

to the comforts of the community Eckkneipe, it is not in itself a direct substitute.

Rather, the pub may be viewed as an arena of contesting identities, of at timesdisputed and at times uncontested authenticity, where the differentiating processes oflocal, national and even European identities are as much a part of the make-up of thepub as is the Guinness on tap and the commoditized Irishness Perhaps due to the mix

of pub culture and cultural representations, the pub provides an arena of drinking

places and spaces where the transformations of national and transnational identities

in a changing Europe are played out

In the midst of this new Europe, in fact at the heart of the old Mitteleuropa and thenew European Union of twenty-five states (as of May 2004), lies Prague, in theCzech Republic As Timothy Hall reviews in his contribution to this book, beer is atthe heart of this heart of Europe; beer drinking is an important and often complicatedpractice, among a people who define themselves at least in part by what and how theydrink This is especially so among males, and Hall’s chapter, like those of just aboutevery author in this collection, relates the constructions of national identity to gender.Masculinity is an important theme in the understanding and practice of beer drinkingamong Czechs, in ways similar to the Berliners and Japanese, but drinking is also awindow on the complexities of gender identity as it intersects with class, ethnic andnational identity, and sexuality As Hall records, in the words of at least one Czech,

a man’s relationship with a beer is just like a relationship with a woman: when youare enjoying either you should not be thinking of any others

The important role which drinking arenas can play in local and national senses of

the self are also demonstrated in Pauline Garvey’s analysis of the vorspiel, a home

drinking party in Norway In the town of Skien, among young adults, drinking,whether in the pub or at home, but in friendship groups where some degree of recip-rocity is expected, demarcates time and space, between day and night, work and leis-ure But drinking practices are also linked to wider notions of individual and groupcharacter, notions which in turn are generated by, and are reflected in, state policies

The vorspiel acts as agent of both order and disorder: it provides some coherence to

groups of people who in other ways and times might reject the values of normalcy

in Norway, but who, through the control provided in the informal but regularizedcycle of drinking, serve to support broader conceptions of social order In this waythe drinking place, the home, becomes a building block of the national space.While these chapters, and the others in this collection, show that it is important

to consider the physical and territorial context to drinking, such a consideration alone

is incomplete In other words, drinking places and spaces are not themselves sically special or of a significance that transcends most other forces in the construc-tion of identities Thus, no matter how socially significant drinking arenas seem, theirimportance also rests with their roles in the framing of actions, networks and othersocial relations beyond their own bounds There is perhaps no more important placewhere drinking is seen to be a significant social act than in the pubs of the BritishIsles, yet even in their case Hunt and Satterlee (1986a: 63) conclude that

intrin-although there exists within the walls of the pub a social world which possesses its ownrules of behavior and its own practices, these behaviors and practices cannot be fullyunderstood if they are seen as discrete entities The rituals, practices, behaviors and socialgroupings found within the pub are inextricably tied to life outside the pub The ‘culture’

of the pub has to be seen as a continuation of the culture of social groupings outside

The obverse is also true: the cultures of the pub, bar, café, shibeen, country club and

street corner have their own continuations elsewhere They too are productive forces

in the differentiations of identity, in part because they are sites in the making andmaintenance of social memory

of the culturally significant behaviours, ideas and values which are associated withalcohol Consider, for example, the roles which drinking plays in establishing thetemporal pattern to the middle-class American’s daily life, in which the time of dayinhibits or entices particular drinking behaviours, and those actions and times markthe socially significant transformations from work to leisure, the work-place to thehome (Gusfield 1987) Also of particular note in this regard are the drinking en-counters in the daily, weekly and annual cycles of the Japanese village discussed byMoeran in the chapter which follows this one, encounters which imply happenstance,but which are often predicted occasions of reciprocal and hierarchical exchange,reinforcing historical and contemporary notions of difference and sameness.The importance of drinking occasions is discussed by many of our contributors,who look at the roles of alcohol and drink as they relate to historical consciousnessand constructions, in terms which make us consider that not only are we what wedrink, but we are also what we drank These ‘drinking memories’ (to paraphraseSutton’s discussion of ‘food memories’ [2001: 4–16]) are particularly importantamong people who perceive that their distinctive regional behaviours and values are

at the core of what can, and perhaps should, be seen as a ‘nation’ Sharryn Kasmirexamines drinking sociability among the Basques, who view their drinking behavi-ours as traditional aspects of the Basque character Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz andGabriela Vargas-Cetina portray the complex relationships among food, drink andmusic in the creation and duration of the Yucatecan soul In this intricate mix ofconsumption and expression, the distinctive nature of a Yucatecan identity, as part of

a regional identity and political movement, takes shape, demonstrating yet again thatleisure activities are very often seen by people to be the embodiment of who they are

as individuals and societies, constitutive of ethnicities and national identities In thechanging relations between the Yucatán and the Mexican state, drinking is one of the

motifs in the Yucatecan construction of who they are and who they were, in aprojection of their authentic history, dating for some to the Mayans.

It is arguable that no nation on earth is more associated with a particular type ofdrink, and particular styles of imbibing, then the French, but as Marion Demossiershows in her chapter in this book (see also Demossier 1997, 2000), while the signifi-cance of wine and wine drinking may be growing in France, the types and uses ofdrinking behaviours are the basis for remarkable divergent social and culturalidentifications Wine is a mode of regional differentiation, class distinction anddiscourse of French national identity What, when, how and why the French drinkwine are increasingly debated topics, in ways which show the twin forces of integra-tion and disintegration at work among the French, long held high as the principalexample of the homogeneous cultural and political nation As a result, wine and itsrelation to life cycles, of the individual, of the village, of the region, continue to playimportant roles in the historicity and negotiations of French region and nation, anegotiation which Demossier contextualizes within globalization, the great force oftime and space compression

The processes of globalization, and the configurations of transnational and otheridentifications of the international migrant, are also changing the ways in whichHong Kong people demonstrate ethnicity, regional identity and class status andmobility In Josephine Smart’s chapter, it is clear that cognac, a symbol of Frenchdrinking and regional identity, has taken on significances that could not have beenpredicted in Hong Kong’s colonial and imperial past Cognac use in Hong Kongtoday, and in recent memory, serves as an example of how one commodity canprovide the code for understanding great changes in local and global economics, thechanging culture of class, and the roles of authenticity and nostalgia in local, regional,national and transnational identity formation and transformation Cognac also is anelement in a changing celebratory ritual, in this case that of the wedding banquet,which is as much a product of modernity as it is of tradition For Hong Kongemigrants, cognac is one of the memories of migration, a practice which allows one

to think of home But Smart also shows us cognac is a commodity, with remarkablelinkages in economic production, exchange and consumption, locally and globally

Drinking Economics

Drinking is an economic relation, linked to the production of alcohol, its marketing,its consumption, and its role, as commodity and symbol, in the wider commodi-fication of society Mary Douglas has viewed alcohol’s production as an ‘economicactivity of consequence’ (1987: 8), which also plays an important role in manyinformal and illegal economies (see also Crump 1987 and Mars and Altman 1987,analyses of alternative economies which were included in the important constructivedrinking collection which Douglas introduced) Drinking is literally a consumptive

activity, which figures importantly in many processes and practices in wider fields

of social consumption In his chapter Brian Moeran investigates how one modity, alcohol, particularly sake, and its related drinking behaviours, can illustratethe regimes of value in rural Japanese economy and society, and the modes andrelative significance of interpersonal business, family and generational relations.Ultimately, this is an act of identity and identification, a demonstration of what itmeans to be Japanese, but it also serves as an example of how one bit of materialculture can give substance to a moral order in the midst of its roles in economic andsocial exchange In this case we see the same processes at work which WilliamRoseberry (1996) identified in middle-class, ‘yuppie’ America, where the distinctions

com-of class which overall society protests are not important can be found in the leged consumption of elite commodities

privi-Examining consumption as an act of social class distinction has been an importantanalytical strategy for some time, chiefly influenced by the works of Mary Douglasand her colleagues (see, for example, Douglas and Isherwood 1979), Pierre Bourdieu(see for example Bourdieu 1984), Arjun Appadurai (see, for example, Appadurai1986) and Daniel Miller (see, for example, Miller 1987) But many of our contrib-utors also present case studies which direct us to investigate exchange as a differenti-ation process, in some terms which are familiar, such as those of capitalist exploitationand accumulation, and some which are no longer principal interests of anthro-pologists, as in reciprocal and redistributive economic and social relations As thechapters by Moeran, Garvey, Smart, Jon Mitchell and Gary Armstrong, and AnthonyMarcus show, drinking is an economic relation, as important perhaps as the politics

of culture in identity matters These ‘identity economics’ are often clearly delineated

in the ethnographic investigation of drinking cultures

Drinking Politics

Drinking is also a political act, whether it be in terms of the grander formal politics

of government, party and policy, or in the interpersonal relations of power andauthority In Anthony Marcus’s chapter we approach the intersections of civil andpolitical society, on the margins of big-city and small-city life in the United States,

in ways which demand that we rethink the roles of social capital in industrialdemocracies At least in the situations in which he and his respondents found them-selves, in public arenas of drinking and drug use, the political ideologies and socialnetworks which were created and sustained provided the basis for alternative politics

to mainstream notions of democracy These are the not the full-blown politics ofnational identity, and their attendant constructions of political culture, but the divisiveand disputed politics of power, representation and democracy, in a country whichseeks to export its reputably homogeneous notions of liberty and democracy, even ifthat exportation is at the point of a bayonet

The politics of the street, where violence constructs the boundaries of ethnicity,masculinity and the social and economic roles of gang members in American cities,are the subjects of the contribution by Geoffrey Hunt, Kathleen MacKenzie andKaren Joe-Laidler They explore the occasions, preferences and expressions of drinkand identity among the youth of three ethnic groupings who find solidarity withingangs They consider ways in which drinking is an important part of being mascu-line, in the context of both ethnicity and gang dynamics, but also how the expressions

of violence and identity vary across the range of ethnic backgrounds Drinkingprovides social cohesion to groups whose actions result in an opposite effect for othergroups in society Both gangs and their victims are faced with the violence anddehumanization of the identity politics of the city, where one ‘does’ drink, drugs andgender in order to gain and keep power

A number of our chapters in this volume, however, also deal with other small andbig politics of the cultural dimensions to politics, especially those of the nation andnational identity Sharryn Kasmir’s analysis of national identity in the Basquelandsstarts with the premise that politics associated with religious and other rituals are realpolitics, like other rituals elsewhere, which are often as central to political expression

in industrial and modern contexts as they are in less developed countries (as soconvincingly demonstrated in Kertzer 1988) Kasmir’s review of a night of slightlyprofane actions, revolving around a representation of the Madonna, is but an intro-duction to the roles which patterns of reciprocal drinking in bars play in differenti-ating Basques from other nations in Spain and France This nationalism, among theBasque youth who figure prominently in this chapter and who take pride in theassociational life rooted in local bars, is a movement for self-determination, a valuedprize for many types of nationalism in Europe and beyond in today’s seeminglyborderless world But Kasmir also reminds us that when we think about the politics

of the nation in the Basquelands, we must also think about the politics of class

(Kasmir 2002), a concern shared by other authors in Drinking Cultures.

Jon Mitchell and Gary Armstrong examine expressions of masculinity in thedrinking behaviours of urban Malta, where cliques, born from long histories ofcolonial relations, express their localism and nationalism through feasts, reciprocalrounds of bar drinks and visits, and sporting celebrations This case study illustratesmany of the themes which vitalize the other chapters: the politics of class andnational identity, the distinctions represented in beer and wine drinking, the formaland informal economic relations which depend on alcohol and drinking behaviors,and the local and global intersections which give definition to identities, and causefor change in all the drinking arenas which have proved so important to Malteseidentity and culture As Mitchell (2002) has discussed elsewhere, Malta also serves

as one of the many places where European identity is a new and important form ofcultural differentiation, and one that is sure to have many more comparators in theexpanding European Union As such, Valletta is a crossroads in the politics ofthe movement of ideas, people, values and goods, where blockbuster film crews,

working-class British tourists and European football teams and symbols intersect,creating new dimensions to the ‘everyday’ and ‘extraordinary’ drinking arenas ofMaltese life, where new and old expressions of identity mix.

Drinking Expressions

Drinking is a communicative act, a performance of identity to be sure, but one whichalso communicates so much more As Turmo (2001: 131) reminds us, drinkingfunctions as an almost silent language, ‘it is a language that, on many occasions,needs neither words nor expressions’ Even the solitary silent drinker in the barspeaks wonders, in part because drinking ‘is a cultural fact on which thousands ofyears, millions of gestures have accumulated’ (Turmo 2001: 130) At other times,however, drink is the elixir of verbiage, the privately understood and publiclysanctioned approval to talk, a lot, and loudly Sometimes this occurs in the course offestivals, parties and celebrations, as we can see in Mitchell and Armstrong’s Maltesecase, a celebration of sport and death, and in the religious parody of ‘Mary in a Box’

in the Basque town which is discussed in Kasmir’s contribution to this book.The convergence in anthropological interest in drinking and communicating takes

us full circle, back to the Japanese study by Moeran with which I began this section

of my chapter In his case study, it is clear that exchanging cups in a ritualizeddrinking occasion is a crucial element in a drinking arena where important informa-tion is also exchanged This information is about business, and the strategies tosucceed, but it is also about the less explicit but no less important demonstration ofgender, class and local identity This drinking talk communicates a great deal aboutthe positions and values of status, hierarchy and reciprocity, between men andwomen, old and young, the dead and the alive ‘Drinking talk’ also provides thisvolume with a good starting point in our joint effort to begin a more comprehensiveapproach to the roles of drink and drinking in the expression of identity

Conclusion

This chapter has sought to clarify the themes which run through the contributions tothe book which it introduces, and to do so with brief visits to the history of theanthropology of drinking and alcohol, recent changes in ways anthropologists haveapproached culture and identity, and the relevance of anthropological studies ofdrinking, ethnicity and national identity to wider scholarly concerns with the differ-entiating processes of culture Our chapters review various aspects of drinking placesand spaces, memories, economics and politics, and wider expressions of culture andidentity Many other thematic threads run through them, such as gendered drinking(a particular focus of the chapters by Hall, Garvey, Mitchell and Armstrong, and Hunt

et al.), consumption and identity (in the chapters by Demossier, O’Carroll and

Smart), religion and identity (as approached in the chapters by Kasmir, and Mitchelland Armstrong), and the interplay of national and regional identities (as examined inthe chapters by Ayora-Diaz and Vargas-Cetina, Kasmir, Marcus and Moeran).Given this range of ethnographic case studies and rich portraits of drinkingpractices, however, it might be easy to lose sight of the one thread that runs throughthem all: national and ethnic identities must be understood in the context of otheridentities and identifications, such as those of class, gender, region, locality andreligion, and all of these find important expression in drinking sites and practices Ifand when alcohol and drinking are moral and health problems, they may also be,perhaps always are, elements of social and political integration and order, whereculture and identity have as much to do with the acceptance of drinking as they dowith its avoidance.

While the themes of the individual chapters often overlap and complement eachother, in that many of them deal simultaneously with ethnic and national identitiesand their construction and expression in drinking memories, economies, politics,places and communication, many also engage other issues of identity and differenti-ation, in terms of age, class, race and locality These similarities and differencesprovide a rich environment in which to investigate the intersections of culture andidentity and drink In fact, it is hoped that the ethnographic cases which follow willhelp to direct anthropologists to further consideration of drinking as an importantexpression of identity and culture, particularly ethnic and national identity, but onewhich also influences scholars to construct innovative comparative research designswhich are not unduly tied to the nation, the nation-state or the ethnic group as theunits for comparison Rather, this volume’s contributions (in concert with de Garineand de Garine 2001a) invite more scholarly attention to the utility of developingethnographic perspectives on drinking as a socially constructive act These perspect-ives should seek to engage cultural differentiation and its intersections with language,economic production, exchange and consumption, and the politics of history, mem-ory, culture and power

Notes

1 See de Garine and de Garine (2001b) for a broader anthropological approach todrinking and culture that places alcohol within wider fields of production andconsumption

2 See, for example, the recent review of Hunt and Barker (2001), which seeks toprovide a new framework for a unified theoretical approach to the anthropologies

of drink and drugs, a theme echoed by Marcus in this book

3 All of which are illustrated in the ‘bar culture’ of rural Catalonia, as depicted byHansen (1976), in an article that still stands as one of the best applications of apolitical economy approach in anthropology to regional and national culture andsociety See Health (2000) for a discussion of the utility of concentrating on

‘drinking occasions’ for comparative analyses of drinking and culture

4 For a discussion of some of these approaches to culture, power and identity, seeHill and Wilson (2003); see also Hall (1990) for one of the most influentialstatements on culture and identity, and one of the clearest on the new importance

of cultural identity in discussions of culture

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